The Road Forward is a 2017 musical documentary film written and directed by Marie Clements about key moments in the history of Indigenous rights in Canada, from the 1930s to today. The film was produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
Clements has stated that the idea for the project came from browsing years of headlines in Native Voice, an Indigenous newspaper from British Columbia that she first heard of while doing research for the 2010 Cultural Olympics, during the Vancouver Olympics. Inspired by the headlines and stories, she began writing lyrics. She then worked with friends who were composers, to set music to her lyrics. [1] [2] [3]
In the film, members of the Native Brotherhood and Native Sisterhood discuss the beginnings of their organizations, in 1931 and 1933 respectively, and how Native Voice had helped unite First Nations in British Columbia. [3]
The Road Forward was initially presented as a musical theatre show in 2015, at Vancouver's Touchstone Theatre. The film features such Indigenous actors and musicians as Murray Porter, Michelle St. John, Cheri Maracle and Evan Adams, as well as songwriter Wayne Lavallee, actor and singer Cheri Maracle, hip-hop artist Ronnie Dean Harris, and Métis fiddler Jeremy James Lavallee. [2] [4]
The film premiered on April 30, 2017 at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto. [1] It subsequently opened the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver on May 4. [2]
Bobbi Lee Maracle was an Indigenous Canadian writer and academic of the Stó꞉lō nation. Born in North Vancouver, British Columbia, she left formal education after grade 8 to travel across North America, attending Simon Fraser University on her return to Canada. Her first book, an autobiography called Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, was published in 1975. She wrote fiction, non-fiction, and criticism and held various academic positions. Maracle's work focused on the lives of Indigenous people, particularly women, in contemporary North America.
Chief Dan George was a chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, a Coast Salish band whose Indian reserve is located on Burrard Inlet in the southeast area of the District of North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He also was an actor, musician, poet and an author. The Chief's best-known written work is "My Heart Soars". As an actor, he is best remembered for portraying Old Lodge Skins opposite Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man (1970), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and for his role in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), as Lone Watie, opposite Clint Eastwood.
Alanis Obomsawin, is an Abenaki American Canadian filmmaker, singer, artist, and activist primarily known for her documentary films. Born in New Hampshire, United States and raised primarily in Quebec, Canada, she has written and directed many National Film Board of Canada documentaries on First Nations issues. Obomsawin is a member of Film Fatales independent women filmmakers.
Michelle Latimer is a Canadian actress, director, writer, and filmmaker. She initially rose to prominence for her role as Trish Simkin on the television series Paradise Falls, shown nationally in Canada on Showcase Television (2001–2004). Since the early 2010s, she has directed several documentaries, including her feature film directorial debut, Alias (2013), and the Viceland series, Rise, which focuses on the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests; the latter won a Canadian Screen Award at the 6th annual ceremony in 2018.
Marie Clements is a Canadian Métis playwright, performer, director, producer and screenwriter. Marie was founding artistic director of urban ink productions, and is currently co-artistic director of red diva projects, and director of her new film company Working Pajama Lab Entertainment. Clements lives on Galiano Island, British Columbia. As a writer Marie has worked in a variety of mediums including theatre, performance, film, multi-media, radio, and television.
The Native Brotherhood of British Columbia is a province-wide First Nations rights organization. It was founded on the 13 December, 1931, during a week long series of meetings between Haida representatives from Masset and Tsimshian representatives in the Tsimshian community of Port Simpson. Masset Haida chief Alfred Adams, Tsimshian ethnologist and chief William Beynon and Chief William Jeffrey were among its four founding members. It was modelled in spirit and structure on the Alaska Native Brotherhood.
Maria Campbell is a Métis author, playwright, broadcaster, filmmaker, and Elder. Campbell is a fluent speaker of four languages: Cree, Michif, Western Ojibwa, and English. Four of her published works have been published in eight countries and translated into four other languages. Campbell has had great influence in her community as she is very politically involved in activism and social movements. Campbell is well known for being the author of Halfbreed, a memoir describing her own experiences as a Métis woman in society and the difficulties she has faced, which are commonly faced by many other women both within and outside of her community.
Tkaronto is a Canadian drama film, which premiered in 2007 at the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival in Toronto. Directed by Shane Belcourt, the film went into commercial release in the summer of 2008.
Cheri Maracle is an Aboriginal Canadian actress and musician of Mohawk-Irish descent.
The imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival is the world's largest Indigenous film and media arts festival, held annually in Toronto in the month of October. The festival focuses on the film, video, radio, and new media work of Indigenous, Aboriginal and First Peoples from around the world. The festival includes screenings, parties, panel discussions, and cultural events.
Finding Dawn is a 2006 documentary film by Métis filmmaker Christine Welsh looking into the fate of an estimated 500 Canadian Aboriginal women who have been murdered or have gone missing over the past 30 years.
Tracey Penelope Tekahentakwa Deer is a screenwriter, film director and newspaper publisher based in Kahnawake, Quebec. Deer has written and directed several award-winning documentaries for Rezolution Pictures, an Aboriginal-run film and television production company. In 2008 she was the first Mohawk woman to win a Gemini Award, for her documentary Club Native. Her TV series Mohawk Girls had five seasons from 2014 to 2017. She also founded her own production company for independent short work.
The Sixties Scoop was a period in which a series of policies were enacted in Canada that enabled child welfare authorities to take, or "scoop up," Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes, from which they would be adopted by white families. Despite its name referencing the 1960s, the Sixties Scoop began in the mid-to-late 1950s and persisted into the 1980s.
Sonia Boileau is a Canadian First Nations filmmaker belonging to the Mohawk Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Zoe Leigh Hopkins is a Canadian Heiltsuk/Mohawk writer and film director who began her career in acting in 1991 and later pursued filmmaking.
Elle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers is a Blackfoot and Sámi filmmaker, actor, producer from the Kainai First Nation in Canada. She has won several accolades for her film work, including multiple Canadian Screen Awards.
Michelle St. John is a Canadian actress, singer, producer and director who has been involved in creative projects in theatre, film, television and music since the 1980s. Her directorial debut, Colonization Road, is a 2016 feature-length documentary that premiered at imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.
Tasha Hubbard is a Canadian First Nations/Cree filmmaker and educator based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Hubbard's credits include three National Film Board of Canada documentaries exploring Indigenous rights in Canada: Two Worlds Colliding, a 2004 Canada Award-winning short film about the Saskatoon freezing deaths, Birth of a Family, a 2017 feature-length documentary about four siblings separated during Canada's Sixties Scoop, and nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up, a 2019 Hot Docs and DOXA Documentary award-winning documentary which examines the death of Colten Boushie, a young Cree man, and the subsequent trial and acquittal of the man who shot him.
nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Tasha Hubbard and released in 2019. The film centres on the 2016 death of Colten Boushie, and depicts his family's struggle to attain justice after the controversial acquittal of Boushie's killer. Narrated by Hubbard, the film also includes a number of animated segments which contextualize the broader history of indigenous peoples of Canada.
Someone Like Me is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor and released in 2021. The film centres on Drake, a gay man from Uganda who moves to Vancouver, British Columbia as a refugee, and the group of Canadians who have agreed to sponsor him through Rainbow Refugee; it documents his arrival in Vancouver and his adaptation to Canadian life, including friction among his sponsors when all he wants to do is celebrate his new freedom by partying, and the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic as a complicating factor.